31 living in England

I’d just turned thirty-one, and saying that out loud felt weird. Sitting on the floor also hurt my back, which seemed about right. I’d thought about making a neat list of lessons or favourite moments from the previous year, but the brainstorming hadn’t produced one. What I had was a collection of thoughts about the life I’d chosen and the person I was becoming.

My twenties had been an experiment, with really high highs, really low lows and plenty of mess. Already, my thirties felt more stable. I knew myself and what I wanted a little better, although certainly not all the time. I wasn’t panicking about getting further into them. I was interested to see what came next.

Learning from something doesn’t make it good

One thought I wanted to keep was that I could look for something to learn from an experience, even a horrible one. That might mean asking what I could do differently, whether I could avoid the situation in future, or how I could handle it better if it happened again. For me, that made a bad situation slightly less bad because I felt I had something I could do.

I was thinking about large, difficult experiences as well as smaller things like a bad day at work or an embarrassing moment at the gym. This wasn’t me saying I’d enjoyed any of them. The change was in how I looked at them afterwards. Asking myself what I could learn helped me feel less passive, and it was something I wanted to continue doing.

My silly videos made some people very angry

YouTube had become a huge part of my life. I’d been making videos for about six or seven years by then, with four hundred and something of them documenting my opinions and experiences as a foreigner in England. I’d intended the channel as a digital scrapbook, somewhere to record my life and how I changed, with easy, slightly silly viewing along the way.

Maybe somebody having a bad day could come home, watch me taste weird crisps and have ten minutes where life was simple. I hadn’t expected how vicious some responses could be. People emailed or commented about my body, called me stupid or annoying, and told me to go back where I came from. Sometimes that was on something as ordinary as a video about my opinions on British humour.

For a long time, I hadn’t fully appreciated how much those comments affected me. As a recovering people pleaser, I’d learned very slowly that being true to myself mattered more than getting everybody to like me. What a relief. I wasn’t going to declare the UK perfect because somebody threatened me in an email, and I didn’t want to change what I enjoyed offline just to make myself more appealing either.

Even my rambling videos are edited

Comparison online had become so automatic in my twenties that I didn’t always realise I was doing it. Sometimes I’d feel miserable and have to stop and ask why. Then I’d realise I was still thinking about somebody’s post, or a reel I’d watched an hour earlier, and how pretty or creative that person seemed compared with me.

I needed to remind myself that an online life is edited. Mine is too. I don’t usually post the times when I’m crying, struggling to shower or having a terrible time. Even the birthday ramble would have pauses, mistakes and unfinished thoughts cut out. Something looking casual doesn’t make it an unfiltered view of somebody’s life.

Thinking deliberately about what I was grateful for had helped my own mood. Adventures and Naps, my loved ones, food I’d enjoyed, experiences, my health and a morning coffee that was somehow still warm all gave me something to think about besides that negative noise. It was annoying how well that worked for me. I wasn’t speaking as a professional, just as somebody who’d found the practice helpful.

I can say that I want something else

I’d kept an old quote about being allowed to interrupt and say that the life in front of you isn’t who you are or what you want. I knew it sounded very early Tumblr, which was absolutely my era, but the idea still mattered to me. It connected with the people pleasing, and with being allowed to choose something different.

I could have stayed in my hometown, gone through school and university, got a job, bought a house, married and had children. Maybe I would have been happy. I didn’t know, because that wasn’t what happened. I wanted something else, and by this birthday I’d spent eight years in England. My life here wasn’t perfect, but it was mine and I’d chosen it, through repeated decisions about what I did and didn’t want.

Adventures and Naps had changed that life for the better too, despite the unpleasant parts of being online. People told me they’d watched through a dark time, or that the videos had helped inspire them to move abroad. Those messages meant an enormous amount to me. At thirty-one I was feeling grateful, happier and excited about continuing, with a better idea of myself than I’d had in my twenties.

Watch my birthday reflections on turning thirty-one.